The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  Court sessions were customarily held at Campus Martius, but also quite often at a considerable distance from Marietta in what was still wilderness, areas in which one of the court’s most difficult duties was to prevent illegal occupations by newcomers. As said in one account, “In those early times, notwithstanding the primitive state of society, the judges had proper ideas of the sanctity of law and the dignity of a court.”

  At the trial of one land case, at which Ephraim and another judge named Alvan Bingham presided, “the leaders of the disorderly class came forward and threatened violence; the magistrates ordered them to leave the room, which they did, but uttering threats to put a stop to such courts.” In the words of one old account, “The judges, determined to vindicate their judicial dignity, instantly issued warrants, and ordered the sheriff to arrest the parties immediately, and take them to Marietta.

  They were arrested accordingly, and it is not easy to conceive of men more frightened; the idea of being taken to Marietta, to be tried by a court that had established a reputation throughout the territory for firmness and strict justice, filled them with terror.

  Judge Bingham’s brother, Silas Bingham, a deputy sheriff and a man known for great shrewdness and dispatch in the role, as well as “unconquerable humor,” did nothing to ease their fears, but told them a better way would be to come into court and get down on their knees and ask for forgiveness and promise amendment.

  The ringleader of the offending party replied, “It was too bad to be compelled to kneel down and ask forgiveness of two Buckeye justices; but he concluded to submit, rather than be taken to Marietta.”

  The judges received no per diem or travel expenses. In all the years Ephraim served in the Court of Common Pleas, he did not receive a cent. Often, coming and going, he had to camp in the wilderness. Yet he never failed attending a single session.

  II.

  By the autumn of 1795, by dint of hard work and consistently high performance over the years since he first arrived at Marietta, Joseph Barker, at age thirty, had achieved notable importance. He was a man of many interests and skills, an independent thinker who read widely. Moreover, he was a happy man, much liked by everyone, and blessed with a family now numbering three children.

  In 1792, he had spent the better part of the year building a new blockhouse at the Point. The year after, hoping to avoid smallpox, he had moved with his family downriver to Belpre, where, part of the time, he taught school. Then, in February 1795, for his services during the Indian Wars, he received a grant of 100 acres seven miles up the Muskingum at what was called Wiseman’s Bottom. That spring, with the help of his two brothers-in-law, he began clearing two acres of giant black walnut and sugar maples, planted an apple orchard, the whole time feeling compelled, as he put it, “to hold his scalp on with one hand while he dug holes for the trees with the other.” By December, he had also completed a 16 x 16-foot log cabin. One week before Christmas, he and his family established themselves on the farm that was to be their home for nearly half a century.

  As would be said, “The fortitude and perseverance requisite to meet the hardships and privations of a settlement in the wilderness, were found centered in this family.” Barker’s wife, Elizabeth, too, was credited with all the patience, resolution, and good sense needed in no small degree. Their nearest neighbors were seven miles away back in Marietta.

  In the year that followed, three more families, including that of Captain Jonathan Devol, moved to Wiseman’s Bottom. Barker cleared more land, enlarged his orchard with 200 peach trees, and put up a larger, hewed log house with a brick chimney, a “refinement” rarely attained by pioneers before the passing of several years.

  He also helped develop a salt spring on the other side of the Muskingum. Clearly he had achieved success in ways he had never imagined. At home, the Barker children were being raised, as one daughter, Catherine, would remember, “to be useful, to be pleasant with our playmates, respectful to superiors, just to all, black or white, good to the poor not showing pride or selfishness but kindness and good will . . . and to see to it that we looked to our own, more than to others’ faults.”

  She would also, much of her life, like to quote words to the wise that were most frequently repeated by her mother, and that could have served for the motto of most of the community:

  Count the day lost at which

  the setting sun

  sees at its close

  no worthy action done.

  But as with so many on the frontier, life was not without its worries and blows. Catherine would also recall, “I sometimes thought it terrible, to live in the woods, and hear tell of snakes, and wolves, and panthers, and when I went to the spring, was afraid I should see some of them.”

  One of the Barker children, a boy named William, drowned in the Muskingum River at age three.

  When fire destroyed the first log cabin Barker had built, which he had since converted into a workshop and storage place for the great stock of tools he had brought from New England, all of which were destroyed, along with a quantity of food, he went back to work as both carpenter and builder.

  As it was, the demand for such skills as he had mastered had grown greater than ever. With the Indian War ended, Marietta had sprung back to life. The revival of river traffic, and abundance of food supplies, trade goods, and a steady flow of new emigrants—families in quest of a new life—had resumed almost instantaneously. Marietta was growing and prospering once again.

  A new post office was established and a first school, Muskingum Academy, under the leadership of Rufus Putnam. A first school building, a modest frame house went up on Front Street. A first courthouse was built on the corner of Second and Putnam Streets, and stood two stories high, with walls three feet thick made of hewn yellow poplar logs.

  Log cabins were being replaced by more comfortable houses with glass windows. A visitor from Massachusetts only a few years later would note in his journal that Marietta had “ninety-one dwelling houses, sixty-five of which are frame or plank, eleven of brick, and three of stone.”

  Much work went on and the demand for such skills as Barker, the master builder, offered only grew greater. Indeed, he had so pursued his interest in and study of architecture by this time and perfected his skills that he could rightly be called the first architect in the Northwest Territory and was to design and build homes for the Reverend Daniel Story, the lawyer Paul Fearing, and others.

  But a magnificent mansion, a structure like nothing else to be seen anywhere along the whole length of the Ohio River, would upstage everything Barker or anyone else had accomplished until then and would remain the subject of much talk for a long time to come, as would its owners.

  Harman Blennerhassett and his wife, Margaret, were like no other couple yet to appear on the Ohio frontier. No one dressed as they did or conversed so readily on so many subjects. Or spent so much money so lavishly or appeared so entirely out of place.

  Both were new to America. He was of Irish aristocracy, a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, and heir to a fortune. She was seven years younger than he, English and though of limited means, well-educated, well-read, and as cultured as her husband. That she was also his niece had played a significant part in their decision to depart for America where they would be less likely to be ostracized for so scandalous a marriage and particularly in the new territory of the remote west.

  They arrived in Marietta in the fall of 1797 and began looking about. After seeing a beautiful island twelve miles below the mouth of the Muskingum, opposite Belpre—an island that was part of Virginia and near land once owned by George Washington—Blennerhassett decided it was the place for him. For the upper portion of the island, a stretch of some 169 acres, he paid an unprecedented sum of $4,500 to the then owner, Elijah Backus, the brother of Lucy Backus Woodbridge.

  He then proceeded to have much of the ground cleared for buildings and gardens. Meantime, the couple moved in to live temporarily in an old abandoned blockhouse on the property whic
h was where their first child, a boy, was born. In no time they became a most conspicuous element locally, a twosome such as had not been seen before, or even imagined.

  He was a tall, thin, gangling man, prematurely gray-haired, and slightly stooped. He dressed in the old English style, with scarlet or buff-colored breeches and silver-buckled shoes. Severely nearsighted, he could read only by putting his face so close to a book that his rather large nose nearly touched the page.

  He was also highly intellectual, fond of experimenting in chemistry and electricity, a classics scholar, an accomplished violinist. As soon became apparent, he was as well quite eccentric, absentminded, a touch snobbish, and easily rattled. On the approach of a thunderstorm, he would close all the doors and windows and huddle in the middle of a bed, to avoid “the accidental effects of the electric fluid.”

  Then, too, notably, he was not always sensible about how he spent his money, and thus was easily duped by some of the locals known for dishonesty. In the days before limestone quarries were opened, river clamshells were calcined on log fires and used to plaster rooms. In bargaining with one noted cheat, Blennerhassett was told that collecting the shells was a difficult task, in that it was necessary to dive into water six or eight feet deep, and therefore the charge was 50 cents a bushel, when in truth any quantity of shells could be found in water only inches deep. Blennerhassett paid five times what the shells were worth.

  Among those he dealt with locally he was known, half in affection, half ridiculed, as “Blanny.”

  Margaret, however, drew ever more attention, and particularly as she appeared far more often in public. Though not beautiful—her neck was a bit too long, her mouth a bit too small—she was tall and stately, a young woman, as said, of “the most perfect proportions, her eyes dark blue, sparkling with life and intelligence.” She rode a white horse superbly and on frequent excursions to Marietta sported a scarlet dress with brass buttons and a white beaver hat festooned with white ostrich feathers and she moved fast. Fluent in French, she was also known for reading Shakespeare aloud with all the vitality of a great actor. At home she often wore a bright yellow or pink silk turban.

  It should be added that her money sense was no better than her husband’s, and the fact that she was his niece was not to become known for several years.

  Because their island—Blennerhassett Island, as it was known—was part of Virginia, eight black slaves were purchased to serve as cooks, waiter, grooms, and to operate ferry service back and forth to the island. This last, most important position was filled by a young black man, Micajah Phillips, known as Cajoe, who had been taught to read and write by Margaret Blennerhassett.

  The total outlay for the house and improvements of the grounds—which featured an extensive English garden laid out and tended by an English gardener named Peter Taylor—would come to an unheard of $50,000, or perhaps more.

  It was clear nothing was to be spared in the way of expenses and that once completed, their home would far exceed in size and elegance any structure to be seen the length of the Ohio Valley. In such a wilderness setting it seemed at first sight totally incongruous and unreal, as did its owners, who, in a land where everyone worked exceedingly hard of necessity, did nothing but whatever suited their pleasures.

  To no one’s surprise the builder chosen for the task was Joseph Barker, who drew up the plans for the house and would be credited, then and later, as the architect, though doubtless others, too, including Blennerhassett, would have been involved in the design.

  Barker laid down substantial boat landings for a sizable workforce and the volume of stone, lumber, and other supplies needed, no small task in itself.

  The house was to be of Palladian design, with a large, two-and-a-half-story, wood-frame main section from which were to extend two portico wings curved like arms reaching out, at the ends of which were to be two other buildings or “dependencies.” The main house, with its ten rooms, would measure 39 x 54 feet and contain fully 7,000 square feet, while the dependencies, though small by contrast, were each 26 x 26 feet, or about the size of the average Ohio cabin.

  The building at the end of the left wing was to be the summer kitchen and servants quarters, that on the right, Harman Blennerhassett’s study.

  Pressure was on to finish as soon as possible, the Blennerhassetts having no wish to wait any longer than necessary to take up residence in their dream palace. As it was, the work went on for two years, and given the scale, the quality, the attention to detail achieved that, too, was remarkable.

  Meanwhile, giant crate-loads of exquisite mirrors and massive furniture, much of it from abroad or custom-made in the east, kept arriving. In good weather, the numbers of visitors to the site grew steadily.

  Everything about the finished interior was done to perfection, with the finest of woods and craftsmanship—from its domed entrance hall to the great dining room and banquet table, to the downstairs drawing room, which, with its polished black walnut paneling floor to ceiling, was considered the finest room of all. Shining brass doorknobs, gold moldings, marbled wallpaper, a giant Venetian window, and well-stocked library upstairs were all further evidence of elegance of the kind one might find only in England or Europe. Yet there it stood on the Ohio frontier.

  One of the many visitors was to describe the house and gardens as “a scene of enchantment, a western paradise, where beauty, wealth, and happiness had found a home.” Others were to call it “the Enchanted Island,” an “Earthly Paradise.”

  The house had cost a fortune. And most happy was the Blennerhassett family, by now increased by two children, when they took up residence. Parties were put on for young people from Marietta and Belpre, and extended social gatherings for the older “more sedate” portions of the community invited to spend several days and nights on the island. Guests came by canoe or rowboat, or most often by the Blennerhassetts’ own ferry service, operated by the ever cordial Cajoe. In the summer when the river was low, many came on horseback.

  Ephraim Cutler was among those who came in social contact with the Blennerhassetts and in later years liked to talk about Mrs. Blennerhassett, describing how she could ride the wildest horses, but he had also known her to walk from her Ohio River landing to Marietta and back in the same day, a distance of twenty-four miles.

  The way of life, the privacy and pleasures of convivial society that Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett had hoped to attain in their wilderness paradise would continue for several years largely as they had envisioned, neither they or anyone else imagining what was to come and that they were, as said, to figure prominently “under the spotlight of history.”

  With startling suddenness, just at the close of the eighteenth century, death had come to George Washington. A heavy cold had turned suddenly to pneumonia, and after the struggle of twenty-four hours, he died at his home at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799. He was sixty-seven years old. His last words were said to have been, “Tis well.”

  The nation, said President Adams in a formal message to Congress, had lost “her most esteemed, beloved, and admired citizen. . . . I feel myself alone, bereaved of my last brother.”

  In Marietta, among the many veterans who had served under Washington during the war, the feeling was much the same.

  With a new century under way, the times were changing nearly everywhere, including Marietta where a promising new enterprise was taking hold.

  In 1800 a merchant named Charles Greene had a 110-ton brig built there on the riverbank by Stephen Devol, an oceangoing square-rigger christened St. Clair, which set sail down the Ohio at the end of April 1801, when the river was at its ideal springtime height. In command was Commodore Abraham Whipple, the famous Revolutionary War naval officer and a new resident of Marietta. It was to be a commercial voyage to New Orleans, then on to Havana, and Philadelphia.

  Along the entire length of the Ohio, from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi, there was only one difficult—even dangerous—stretch, and that was the “Falls” or “Rapids” at a
bend in the river at Louisville, Kentucky. There a ledge of rocks extended across the river over a distance of about two miles, and the river cascaded down in whitewater rapids some twenty-six feet.

  When the river was high, the fall was made apparent only by the increased speed of the vessel. If the river was low, the rocks came into plain view and the passage became quite dangerous.

  There was a choice of three channels. One on the north side called the Indian chute was the main channel. Another, the middle chute, was considered safe and easy in all heights of the water above middle stage. The third on the south side, called the Kentucky chute, was passable only with the water high.

  Under the right conditions the Falls could be passed without great difficulty by canoes, flatboats, and keelboats. There were also experienced pilots regularly on hand to conduct boat traffic over the rapids. But how well a square-rigger the size of the St. Clair might do was a subject of much speculation.

  As it turned out, Commodore Whipple, with his abilities as a seaman, negotiated the challenge himself in his own way and with perfect success. He went over the Falls backwards—stern first—dragging two anchors from his bow to keep to the center of the channel and control the descent.

  He then sailed downstream and on to the Mississippi to New Orleans and out to sea.

  At Wiseman’s Bottom on the Muskingum, Joseph Barker’s friend and neighbor, Jonathan Devol, had started building a ship of 400 tons for a Marietta merchant named Gilman, the entire vessel made of the black walnut that grew in such abundance along the river. The year following, Devol built two more ships, brigs of 200 tons, and Barker, too, established his own shipyard on his farm by the Muskingum and in 1802 built two ships on order, one a brig for Harman Blennerhassett, the other a schooner for Edward White Tupper.